The Singing Sword

EPILOGUE: SUMMER, 401 A.D.

Ullic clapped me on the shoulder, got up from his stool and went out into the bright, hot day, leaving his heavy, ceremonial helmet on the bench beside me. It crossed my mind to call him back for it, but then I thought that, eagle helmet though it might be, it was not going to fly away and he would come back for it later. I smiled at the thought and reached for the pot of polishing oil I had been using, but my outstretched fingers caught the rim of it and the pot overturned, spilling the thin oil over my work-bench. I cursed and scrambled to pick up the odds and ends threatened by the spill, and felt a lance of remembered pain pierce me as my hand closed over a rolled scroll that had lain forgotten there at the back of my bench for months. I stood as though petrified for a few moments clutching the thing, and then I sat back on my stool, leaving the spilt oil to do what it would and unrolling the parchment for the second time since I had received it.

Greetings, Father,

You have been proven prophetic. Stilicho has recalled me to Rome. The barbarian King Alaric — how unlike our own dear friend — and his Visigoths stand poised to attack the Motherland itself. My preparations are being made in haste, for I must move with all possible speed. Stilicho's word is peremptory. "Come at once," he bids me. "Bring your men and leave all else behind." That, in this case, means horses, since I have no way of shipping out all my stock at such short notice. Your commission from Stilicho entitles you to have what I cannot take with me.

I have dispatched word to my depots in Glevum, Durovernum and Londinium itself to expect your men, who will take the horses I have left for you. In all, there will be six hundred and eighty head. Collect them quickly. I proceed in haste, but there may be others who must follow later. I know you will use the horses well. I shall return for them some day.

I must rely on you to use your powers of explanation and persuasion with Enid. I have tried to write to her, but find I am unable to write the words I ought to. My wounds have healed, but they have left me speechless and unlovely, so she is encumbered with a husband who is both ugly and absent. Explain to her, if you will, that these cancel each other out. I will return, some day. My love to Publius Varrus and his family. Look after my wife and my son while I am gone.

Farewell, Picus.

Addendum: I hear nothing of Seneca since I received my wound. He may have died in the fighting in the north. I hope so. If he still lives, however, he will sail with me to Stilicho's command.

Even now, months later, the words still had power to hurt.

The soldier who brought the missive had disturbed me at my work. Luceiia had sent him to me with his message and I had read it and sent him to the kitchens at the fort, thinking he would have to return quickly. But he had asked my pardon and informed me that he was Gwynn, and had been Master of the Stables for Picus here in Britain. Picus had left him behind to work with Victorex, who was now a very old man. Surprised, and still in a state of shock from receipt of the letter, I had welcomed him to our Colony and failed to understand the blankness of his look when I called it by name. I had thought then to explain, but had not had the patience at the time. Instead, I told him that he would learn the whole story later.

He had smiled at me and saluted crisply, saying he was sure he would, and I stood there and watched him march briskly away, thinking how incredibly young he looked to have already retired from being Master of the Stables of the Imperial Armies of Britain, and thinking also that the story I could have told him was not really long at all.

Caius Britannicus, who had built this Colony, had been born in the oldest Roman town in Britain, a town built on the site of a settlement already honoured for centuries as the home of Lod, war god of the Trinovantes of the east. Over the four hundred years since then, men had gradually changed its name to Colchester, meaning "the fort on the hill," but Caius had always called it by its real name, its ancient name, Camulodunum, deploring as usual the way men changed things for the sake of change, with no thought of tradition or the ancient value of the thing thus changed.

Here in his beloved west, on another hill, he had built another fort, this one without a name. It was his mausoleum, standing above his grave. His sister, my wife Luceiia, had named it in his honour, recalling his own words. "None of your Celtic jaw-breakers," she had said. "Give it a new name, this fort on a hill — a British name, not Roman or Celtic. Not Camulodunum, but a name of this land. And make it a simple name, a name that men will hear and know and remember."

We called it Camulod, in honour of Caius Britannicus, the last of the great Roman Eagles of Britain. When we are dead and gone, men may make of it what they wish.

I released the scroll; it rewound itself with a parchment rustle, and I wondered if I would ever see Picus Britannicus again. Then I became aware once more of the smoothness of polished wood under the ball of my thumb and looked down at the surface of the case I had spent so much time making. I was not a worker in wood by choice, but I had had no other option than to make this case myself, using as a model the much smaller one left me by my grandfather to hold the skystone dagger, many years before. This case was of planed and polished oak, and set into the lustrous surface of the top was a silver star, trailing a comet-tail of gold. I picked it up and carried it to the back of the forge, where I opened it up and ran my hand once more over the fitted doeskin that lined the interior. It would suffice.

The sword lay where I had left it, wrapped in a silken cloth that Luceiia would have skinned me alive for taking, had she known. I undid the silk and lifted the weapon that it caressed. Excalibur! The name was right for it. Lightning flickered along its mirrored blade and sparkled on its finely tempered edges that bore marks like the ripple shadows of pure water. This was my lifetime's work: this single sword, unique from the tip of its blade to the scalloped pommel, a sword fit for a king to wield, a king whose day would come long after I was forgotten dust. Whoever he might be, he would have a sword to reckon with, and as long as Excalibur existed, I would never really be forgotten. I hefted it, admiring the play of light on its great cross-guard and loving the textured firmness of the hilt, bound in the belly skin of a giant shark. Caius Britannicus had never had the opportunity to admire the wonder that his Lady of the Lake had provided. But he had swung it once, before it was gripped with shark skin, and it had not slipped in his bloodied hand. I placed it gently in its case, into the doeskin-lined depression shaped so carefully to its size, and closed the lid.

Ullic's great ceremonial helmet still lay on the bench, and I picked it up and held it at eye-level, looking into the still-fierce, golden eyes of the eagle's head that fronted it above the massive, predatory beak. My professional interest was stirred briefly as I wondered how the artist who made this thing had kept the giant bird so lifelike, but then the eyes dissolved and I saw Caius staring into my face that day, almost fifty years before, when he had found me paralysed among a pile of corpses. A lump swelled in my throat and I grunted and jammed the helmet onto my head. I hoisted the case containing Excalibur up to my shoulder and set out to walk back to my house — to my beloved wife, who might or might not be there, dependent upon her ever-expanding timetable of meetings of the Women's Council — and to the rest of my family and the inheritors of our dream, the grandsons of my best friend and myself.

I wondered which of the two boys would wield the sword in years to come? Would it be Uther, already a brawler at six months and bold with his mother's magpie beauty, or would it be his gentler cousin, Merlyn, the golden-haired Britannicus? The debate gave me pleasure and I found myself whistling for the first time in months as I walked through the summer sunshine. Equus was coming towards me, deep in conversation with Joseph, the young apprentice who was now our best craftsman. I saw what I had not noticed before — that Joseph was now a full-grown man — and I smiled, accepting the knowledge, once and for all, that the world belonged to the young people now growing, and that my own tasks had almost been completed.

The End